For many IT organizations, 2014 is going to bring a renewed
emphasis on refining their network and data center operations to ensure they deliver
the best user experience possible. From our perspective, then, 2014 trends will
include:

Making Mobile Part of
Application User Experience Monitoring - The move towards infrastructure as
a service (IaaS) is pushing business applications into the cloud. Similarly,
increasing demand for mobile access to those business applications is pushing
the development of native, mobile applications that are optimized to access the
business applications via smartphones and tablets. In turn, more companies will
extend their user experience monitoring to include the mobile applications
executing on the users' mobile devices as well as the applications executing on
backend servers.

Automating
Application Workloads - We'll continue to see an integration of application
workloads in private data centers and public clouds as more companies turn to public
cloud infrastructures to extend their own data centers for agile, elastic
service provisioning. That means some workloads running in the private data
center will have to move to the cloud. Going forward, more businesses will
adopt tools that can automate and facilitate workload management across private
and public clouds.

Making Sense of Big
Data with Analytics - The increase in the volume of machine data generated
by the Internet of Things as well as the data flood unleashed by social
networking and other Big Data sources will make it increasingly difficult to
manually analyze data. As a result, companies will increase their adoption of
analytics solutions whenever they need to make informed, actionable decisions
in any area that is subject to a significant amount of data. On a related
point, businesses will also increase their adoption of NoSQL databases like
Cassandra and MongoDB to handle the growing volume of enterprise data.

Beefing up the Data
Center - In the data center, businesses are going to act on several fronts.
First, we'll see more data center automation. The goals here will be to reduce
manual errors and free admins from the burden of repeatedly executing routine
tasks. Automating processes and workflows for things like incident, problem,
change and release management will help businesses improve the quality of IT
services and mitigate the impact of new changes. We'll also see the use of
pooled resources for compute, storage and network and the integration of
management systems to cover all aspects of the data center.

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About the Author

Raj Sabhlok is the president of Zoho Corp. (ManageEngine is a division of Zoho Corp.). Raj has particular interest in
IT management software having spent nearly 20 years at companies like
Embarcadero Technologies, BMC Software and The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). In
his career, Raj has held technical, marketing, sales and executive management
positions. Raj attended Duke University's Fuqua School of Business for his MBA.